Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.

Friday, April 29, 2016

Editorial - BLM falling down on the job

Reason
No. 297 why the federal government should cede control of a large swath
of its sweeping Nevada real estate portfolio to those who actually live
here:

For years, the Bureau of Land Management has done a
miserable job of managing wild horse populations in the West. Thanks to
that dereliction of duty, the BLM recently informed ranchers in
northeastern Nevada that there will be further restrictions on grazing
permits because wild horses have overrun certain areas, compromising the
health of range lands.

The move could suck $1.8 million out of
the Elko County economy. A cynic might suggest that all of this is no
accident, given federal land managers have been squeezing ranchers for
years.

At any rate, Gov. Brian Sandoval on Tuesday said he may go
to court to force the feds to more aggressively address the wild horse
issue. He found support from Republicans in the state’s congressional
delegation. “Unfortunately, the BLM has not lived up to its end of the
bargain” on this issue, said Rep. Cresent Hardy, adding that the
agency’s failure could “rob hard-working Nevadans of their livelihoods.”

This is all well and good, as far as it goes. But this is a symptom of a larger issue.

Environmentalists
routinely dismiss concerns about Washington overseeing some 85 percent
of Nevada’s acreage, arguing the federal government’s vast resources
make it a more appropriate manager of these land holdings than the local
yokels. But is it really so fantastical to posit that if these lands
were under the domain of state or local interests, the wild horse
problem would have been sufficiently confronted by now?

Instead,
ranchers in Elko County — some of whom have been working the land for
generations — now face financial strain thanks to the inaction of
federal bureaucrats sitting in their comfortable beltway offices more
than 2,000 miles away.